her mottled hands and casting her eye over the sideboard top, perhaps in quest of the cash Garth should have taken off his patrons. Finally she gave this up and turned towards him again. 'Well,' she said with an upward, munching movement of her jaws, 'I'll be getting on,' and made to leave the room.
'I'll be going for my usual,' said Garth with a kind of wink at her in his inflection.
Five-mile jog? Aberystwyth BA (Hons)? Chicken and chips? Without staying to consider, Charlie got Peter out through the hall and on to the porch as soon as the coast was clear. The rain had packed up and there was a great tapping and plopping as what had already fallen dripped off the trees and the eaves of the houses. With the sky mostly clear now there was if anything more light than when they had arrived.
'Charlie,' said Peter as they stood at the top of the steps. 'I simply-'
'Yes, I know. Listen: I'm too drunk to drive and you're too, er, drunk to drive. As you mayor may not have noticed there's a pub on the top corner where we turned off. However gruesome its appointments it must sell drink and possess a telephone. While you're working on a very large whisky I'll mobilize Victor. Then sandwiches and our own bottle in the fiat at the Glendower and your car fetched. How about that, Major?'
'Oh... fine. I mean coming on top of... '
'Of course. Tell me later. Left at the gate, then eighty yards or so along to the corner. Not more.'
Nine - Peter
1
'That was Wi11iam,' said Peter. 'Not dressed yet. He says we're to go on and he'll see us at the church.'
'Hardly a bolt from the blue.' Muriel was moving a hat about on her head in front of her dressing-table. 'I can't remember having this out of the cupboard since the day the lad took his degree.' She turned lingeringly away from her reflection. 'Well, what do you think, then?'
Peter thought in general that most people seeing the two of them as a married couple would wonder what cruel fate had landed such a comparatively presentable female, still slim and well taken care of as to skin and hair, with such a bloated, beaten-up old slob. More to the purpose, he thought that the subtle fore-and-aft groove or corrugation in the crown of the hat gave it a slightly sat-on look. But that was not called for either. He concentrated his attention. 'Fine,' he said, widening his eyes and giving a succession of little nods. 'Fine.'
'Or there's this one. I'm not sure I've ever even had it on till now since the bloody shop.'
It was like a sturdy cake-frill in pale pink with a reinforced gauze or netting top. He nodded at it more slowly and judicially, finding no words.
'Which do you think is better?'
After a moment of the usual attempted clairvoyance he reminded himself sharply that the day might have come when, in defiance of all history, she was asking him what he thought because she wanted to know. Still no help. Trying not to smirk at his own cunning, he said, 'I suppose some of the women will be wearing hats, will they? I thought even for weddings it had more or less faded away. Of course I'm not much of a - '
'Oh, it's a dead duck in England, wearing hats. Never see them in London.'
'Well then... '
'Ah, but we're not in England.'
'I'm sure it would be perfectly all right. Nobody would object.'
'Well, I don't want to offend the native wives by flouting ancestral taboos.'
He bad thought that line quite funny on its first appearance about the time of Suez. 'I don't think you need worry. ' Rather to his regret she took off the cake-frill piece and laid it on the dressing-table. 'How do I look without it? Go on.'
'All right,' he said soberly. 'You look all right.' Yes, she had been going to do that all along.
'Good. That's settled that. Well, we'd better be getting...
'Oh, we've got a bit of time yet.'
'There's a case for being in position when you're expected to be.'
To hear this sentiment on Muriel's lips marginally astonished Peter, but he said nothing more than, 'Okay, well I'll go and bring the car round.. You come down when you're ready.'
As he almost ran down the stairs he affirmed internally that he must put top priority on pulling himself together. If he went on in that kind of strain, going off at tangents, giving brilliant imitations of a man who really wanted his wife to look her best and things like that, he would soon come to grief. From the moment early in the year when William had announced his intention to marry Rosemary Weaver, Peter had been given a new lease of life. Every time he thought of it he felt as if he had been reading a communique announcing a catastrophic defeat of the shits.
In the hall now, moving with exemplary speed for one of his weight and condition, he climbed up on the pseudo-Chippendale chair by the telephone and swung about just in time to fart with a kind of gulping sound into an enormous green and mauve face, rendered in a mixture of paint and filth, that hung from the side of the stairway. On descending, much elated, he spotted the necessary bottle of Famous Grouse in its place on the dresser in the kitchen. Spotting it was all that was needed. Without bothering about surely on this day of all days, etc., he took just one small quick nip and then just one more small quick nip. Irrelevantly, he remembered Charlie once informing him that ghillies or crofters or some such persons in the Scottish Highlands would drink regularly, as a matter of routine, a tumbler of whisky before setting out on the day's round, so at least Charlie had said as he put down a similar quantity to see him through their twenty-minute car-journey to a lawyers' piss-up in Welsh St Hilarys.
It was a fine bright morning in early March of the sort much more often recalled in these parts than actually met with, the air calm and mild along the whole of the coastal plain and inshore waters. On days like this gardeners recently in London, but not gardeners alone, would say how much further forward everything in Wales seemed to be: daffodils, rhododendrons, azaleas, even the sticky-buds on the chestnuts were two or three weeks ahead of what you saw in the London parks and squares. Low in the sky still, the sun made long shadows, casting a light no stronger than that on a summer's· evening, clear but not vivid, with a softness that would be gone by May. Cwmgwyrdd gleamed gently in the sunshine, and Peter, who had noticed the good weather, felt for a few moments that it was not such a hopelessly bad place to live as he let himself into the garage.
'Am I all right?' he asked Muriel when she came down into the hall.
